I wanted to pitch one of my friends, Tiffany Ha, as a potential composers for your projects.

She is a very good, real-life friend of mine - we sing in two different choirs together and have played together in a band. She would like to do more compositions, particularly for gaming projects, so I told her I’d put my various connections to work.

And here is her website. Don’t be fooled by the chamber-oriented pieces on display here. I think her range is far greater than the work you’ll see listed there.

Tiff is more than capable of pulling off a variety of styles. Things work best if you can give detailed, qualitative descriptions of the musical journey that you want. For example, “I want this main theme to convey an epic journey into the unknown” and/or “I would like the song to incorporate this melody, but make it sound dark and foreboding” are helpful places to begin. I’m sure people like @Myke can attest to her work.

Some things you might potentially want compositions for:

an original piece for your hack/project (duh!).

an arrangement of an existing song e.g. “a battle theme based on Eliwood’s theme” or “a fast-paced map theme based on Ninian’s theme”

a jingle/theme song for your YouTube channel

ambient background music for your videos

Direct transcriptions are a no-go (this would include things such as “a GBA-insertable version of Id~Purpose”, which is substantially more work than an original comp)

An original composition would provide a much higher degree of originality and uniqueness to a project which I think it difficult to convey through other means. Rates can be discussed if you’re interested and would vary depending on the complexity of the composition. If you have a means of offering decent exposure (like crediting and linking the artist in videos) then this can be factored in with the rates.

Reading this, it’s interesting that the “GBA insertable version of ID purpose” is more difficult than the original comp. To me, if you are already making a GBA insertable song, making it a copy of another song would be easier than making one from scratch. (I’m a music noob, so I’m not saying I’m right, I’m saying that’s something I wouldn’t expect)

If you’re unable to get a MIDI or even sheet music for the song you wish to transcribe, you have to recreate a song by ear. You have to make a track based completely on notes you can hear in the song. It’s very easy to mess up fast or strange rhythms or sections of notes just because you don’t have a reference for sheet music.

Now imagine doing this up to sixteen times for several different instruments, all with their own parts in the harmony. Not only do you have to make the tracks, but you also have to adjust instruments to sound similar and work in a way that doesn’t sound dissonant. You can also end up going “shit wait i forgot there was this one low sound in the background, let me go back and recreate that and make sure it doesn’t mess up my composition and make me go over 12 notes at a time”.

Original tracks don’t suffer from this problem, since you are always correct when creating an original melody, or choosing instruments from your own song.

It takes a very long time and lots of listening to the original song over and over again, along with lots of theory knowledge and quite often a bit of educated guessing, since the originals can be of dubious quality. It can be done; it just isn’t feasible.